File 05 PAI 40 SAG 20 157-326_Hartley 10/29/13 11:41 AM Page 255 JOSEPH NOBLE GEORGE OPPEN’S DISCRETE SERIES : THINGS AMONG OTHERS George Oppen wrote his first book, Discrete Series , in the early 1930 s, and it was published in 1934 with a foreword by Ezra Pound. The period preceding Discrete Series was one of personal and, to a certain extent, political discovery for George and Mary Oppen. They met at college in Corvallis, Oregon, but because they spent a night together, Mary was expelled and George was suspended. This was the beginning of their long relationship together and discovery of each other. Much of the early life of the Oppens was spent trying to achieve their own independence, especially from George’s father and stepmother who were both wealthy. They spent time in San Francisco, George working in one of his father’s theaters, but left to hitchhike cross-country when they found out George’s father was due back in town. Of this period of discovery, Mary Oppen writes, We were in search of an esthetic within which to live, and we were looking for it in our own American roots, in our own country. We had learned at col - lege that poetry was being written in our own times, and that in order for us to write it was not necessary for us to ground ourselves in the academic; the ground we needed was the roads we were travelling. As we were new, so we had new roots, and we knew little of our own country. Hitchhiking became more than flight from a powerful family—our discoveries themselves became an esthetic and a disclosure. ( 68 ) They ended up in Texas for a while, but when Mary became sick, they moved back to the San Francisco Bay area. George again worked in one of his father’s theaters, but his father’s world did not suit them, so they traveled cross-country again, hitchhiking to Detroit and then sailing via Lake Erie and the Erie Canal to New 255 File 05 PAI 40 SAG 20 157-326_Hartley 10/29/13 11:41 AM Page 256 256 A Festschrift for Burton Hatlen York City. There they were exposed to avant-garde modernism and the poetry of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff. They met and became friends with the latter three. After another year in San Francisco, the Oppens went to France where they lived from 1929 to 1932 . In Europe, they met Pound and other writers and artists. But besides their artistic consciousness, they were also discovering their political consciousness: “We had visited Ezra Pound and heard him speak of Mussolini as ‘The Boss’; we had been alerted to the dangers of fascism when we saw Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, and we had been present at a fascist demonstration in Italy” (Mary Oppen 150 ). Discrete Series is a book very much influenced by the imagist and modernist aesthetic of Pound, and also the poetry of Williams, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff. Parataxis and ellipsis are the order of the day in the book, written in a lean, sinewy style. There is a fresh and sparkling quality to the images found in the series. The book is one of discovery; in it, in nascent form, we find many of the concerns Oppen was to think and write about for the rest of his life: technol - ogy, modern urban life, social milieux, and, above all, relationships, whether between person and person, person and world, or person and self. Mary Oppen writes of the importance of their relationship and how the “strength of our intelligences, our passions and our sen - sibilities [were] multiplied by living our lives together.” With George, she encountered a “world in which I would find conversa - tion, ideas, poetry, peers” ( 65 ), echoing his own statement that “I mean to be part of a conversation among honest people” ( Selected Letters 55 ). Discrete Series is the literary beginning of this conversa - tion. The title of Discrete Series is significant for the type of poetry Oppen was to write throughout his life and for the points I will be trying to make about his work. Let us first examine two statements he made about this work and its title, the first taken from his unpub - lished papers and subsequently printed in Ironwood , the second taken from his interview with L. S. Dembo. Each term of a purely mathematical series is derived by a rule or a conven - tion from the preceding term. A discrete series, to the mathematician, is a series of which each term is empirically true. The problem of poetry, circa 1929 –1933 , was, I thought, the problem of honesty and of intelligence: and to construct meaning , an adequate vision. (“Adequate” 31 ) File 05 PAI 40 SAG 20 157-326_Hartley 10/29/13 11:41 AM Page 257 Joseph Noble / George Oppen’s Discrete Series 257 My book, of course, was called Discrete Series . That’s a phrase in mathemat - ics. A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. I was attempt - ing to construct a meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements. (174 ) Both passages define what a discrete series is for Oppen: a series where each term is not derived from the preceding one but rather is empirically derived or true. Here we find that impulse in Oppen’s work of “letting-be,” of treating each thing as a discrete being. This way of treating things is described as “honest” and “true” and is con - nected to technique, to constructing meaning by empirical and ima - gist statements, so that, in Poundian terms, we see “technique as the test of a man’s sincerity” (Pound 9). But what’s more, technique becomes “an adequate vision,” a way of looking at and talking about things, a metaphysics. “I’m trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of whether one’s thought is valid” (Interview 175 ). The technique, the images, become the means of testing not only our sin - cerity but also our thought, our metaphysics. Yet even if a discrete series is a group of discrete elements that are not derived from preceding elements, a series of any kind is still a grouping of things related in some way, even if it is by the fact that none is derived from the other, by the fact of their difference. This kind of grouping can be seen as similar to Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of community where beings are defined by difference and finitude, or even, for that matter, to Sassure’s notion of language where each word is defined by what it is not. Nancy says that Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. Community is what takes place always through others and for others. It is not the space of the egos —subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal—but of the I’s, who are always others (or else are nothing). It is not a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We . It is the com - munity of others . ( 15 ) There is no fusion in community, and the only bond that we can know is the one of our finite, multiple existences existing in common File 05 PAI 40 SAG 20 157-326_Hartley 10/29/13 11:41 AM Page 258 258 A Festschrift for Burton Hatlen through our finitude. “Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) ‘lack of identity .’ This is what philosophy calls ‘finitude ’” (xxxviii). 1 Nancy’s idea of community might also be compared to Oppen’s “conversation” among honest people. The notion of discreteness is seen not just in the way the individ - ual poems of Discrete Series are grouped, but also in the nature of Oppen’s use of language itself in the poems, a modus operandi that was to be with him throughout his career. The words and phrases themselves, as we shall see, become discrete quantities placed one beside the other in paratactic manner. This is part of his self-avowed nominalistic sensibility. In addressing L. S. Dembo’s observation that Discrete Series seemed cubist in approach, Oppen says, I’m really not sure what troubles the cubists had, but I had trouble with syn - tax in this undertaking and, as a matter of fact, I still have trouble with verbs. It’s not exactly trouble; I just didn’t want to put it too pretentiously. I’m really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject-matter in order to make a comment about it. It is still a principle with me, of more than poetry, to notice, to state, to lay down the substantive for its own sake. I don’t know whether that’s clear. (Interview 174 ) So there is a technique in Oppen’s poetry of setting poems, syntacti - cal groupings, and even just nouns, side by side, of letting them coex - ist, of letting-them-be separately together.